Category Archives: planning

SXSW “homeless hotspot” concept goes tragically (and predictably) wrong

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What was BBH Labs thinking? Michael Sebastien at PR Daily is on the money in saying that “it might go down as one of the biggest PR disasters of the year.”

New York-based marketing firm BBH Labs equipped homeless people on the streets of Austin with devices that made them wireless hot spots. Internet seekers then paid what they wanted—in cash or via PayPal—to access the Web. The homeless men and women kept all of the money.

The media wasn’t amused, and now BBH Labs is licking its wounds.

ReadWriteWeb slammed BBH Labs, pointing out that these are people, “not helpless pieces of privilege-extending human infrastructure.”

The T-shirts that the people participating in the campaign wear say:

I’M [FIRST NAME],
A 4G HOTSPOT
SMS HH [FIRST NAME]
TO 25827 FOR ACCESS
http://www.homelesshotspots.org

Wired referred to it as something out of a “darkly satirical science-fiction dystopia.”

It seems like the idea was ultimately about benefiting the homeless. I’m a huge fan of that, and anybody familiar with me and my work knows I have no aversion to risky and edgy, either. So I suppose I applaud to core concept.

But I’m also a big fan of thinking things through. “Risky” comes, you know, with risk. If you’re going to take chances, you have an obligation to game the potential scenarios, to anticipate where things might go wrong and to plan your way around the minefields.

It doesn’t look like BBH did a very good job on this front and now they’ve garnered lots and lots of exposure. Contrary to what you may have heard, all publicity is not good publicity, especially when the end result is that you may have actually damaged your cause.

New report notices that Boomers are retiring; offers band-aid for sucking chest wound…

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Lately I’ve been talking a lot about the looming macro-succession crisis, and it’s felt like I’m the only one who sees the issue coming. This morning, though, a MediaPost item addressing a piece of the issue came across the desk, and while it’s only partially aware of the whole problem and the solution it points to is a half-measure at best, it’s at least nice to see a little validation on the subject.

Thursday July 12, 2007
Retiring Boomers Important in Hand-off to Younger Employees

A recent survey of 28,000 employers in 25 countries, by Manpower, revealed that only 21 percent have implemented retention strategies to keep their senior employees participating in the workforce. Continue reading →

How the macro-succession crisis is going to hit the entrepreneurial sector

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I’ve written recently about some generational issues facing companies – most notably the “macro-succession crisis” that I suspect very few corporations have even thought about in meaningful detail. In that post I examine how the coming Baby Boomer retirement explosion is going to engender all kinds of crisis, especially in larger legacy corporations that are so top-heavy with Boomer leaders that their Gen X successors are ill-prepared for the transition that must begin taking place in the next five years.

But if you’re a different kind of company – say an entrepreneurial outfit started and run by front-edge Xers (people now in their early to mid-40s) – you’re in good shape, right? You aren’t facing a retirement wave. You aren’t facing the need for a painful adjustment from Boomer-style leadership to the far different style of Xer execs. And this means there’s going to be no leadership vacuum at the top sucking everybody higher in the organization and creating trainwrecks at the Xer-to-Millennial lower management level, either. Life is good.

Except that you’re wrong – the macro-succession crisis is coming for you, too. Continue reading →

Where does mobile fit in the social media discussion?

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If you’ve snooped around the site, you probably know that mobility is coming along a lot more slowly than I feel like it should. For every business out there doing a good job ramping up mobile marketing there’s probably a few thousand doing nothing. Why is a little hard for me to fathom – mobile is a preferred medium for Millennial-aged consumers, who control more disposable income than any generation in history. Why you’d refuse to communicate with these customers on their own terms is beyond me.

Well, maybe not. Mobile is comparatively new for most corporate decision-makers, most of who fail to understand the real extent of its capabilities. Sure, new technologies and practices often take longer to get traction in the marketplace than we’d expect – I remember the result of a poll from about 1996 or so that said less than half the US population had even heard of the Internet, and at that point in time the Net was being dramatically underused, as well.

Recently, though, I’ve noticed a phenomenon that concerns me Continue reading →

The looming macro-succession crisis

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I was reading a Seattle Times story earlier today on how men in their 30s are earning less than their fathers did. An interesting story top to bottom, but the concluding section drew me back around to something that I really haven’t talked about enough lately – the looming generational macro-succession nightmare facing corporate America.

Diehard careerist baby boomers also might partly explain the inability of 30-something men to move up the income ladder as quickly as their fathers. From the moment Generation Xers entered the workplace, boomers have been the “ceiling” blocking their way up the income ladder, said Peter Rose, a partner with marketing-research company Yankelovich in Los Angeles.”The boomers stand out in defining themselves in terms of their work and have shown a disinclination to get out of the way,” he said.

It’s hard to blame the Boomers for not getting the heck out of the way, although I’ve certainly been one of those Xers stacked up beneath that in-no-hurry-to-leave Boomer leadership dynamic. But there’s a basic numbers crunch that’s about to hit, and it’s going to throw a lot of companies into leadership transition crisis. Consider: Continue reading →

Small event illustrates big-time lesson

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One of the most valuable lessons I learned from working with Anders Gronstedt of Gronstedt Group over the past several years is that the brand lives with the customer, not the brand group. Not to diminish to importance of traditional branding activities, but nothing that happens at corporate is as critical to the life of the brand as what happens across the various customer touchpoints. My call to customer service is the single most important factor in my understanding of your brand and is the single event that will determine what I tell my friends, family and co-workers about your company, products and services. If I was lured into trying your product or service by effective marketing on your part, then your failure to deliver might be interpreted as a betrayal, and the kind of word-of-mouth that drives is your worst nightmare.

Last weekend I tripped across an almost archetypal case study of what can happen when a business does everything right on the traditional branding front, but pays too little attention to the customer’s hands-on interaction with the brand.

My wife and I drove up to Raffaldini Vineyards in the heart of North Carolina’s emerging Yadkin Valley wine country for the winery’s Second Annual Italian Festival. Continue reading →